Posts Tagged ‘Camus’

Montaigne invented the genre he called “Essays”, from “essayer”, to try. His essays are all over the place. So is his logic, or logic in general. And knowledge. And species. All over.

We are nothing, if we are not rich in mental possibilities.

“Essay”, the way Montaigne had it, was a new usage. “Pseudosopher” is outright a neologism (from Greek“pseudein”, deceive, cheat by lies). It’s more elegant than “fake philosopher”.

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Differently from pseudosophers, real philosophers don’t need friends.

One way Camus resisted to the “Absurd” he perceived all too readily, all over, was by having plenty of various groups of friends. Nights with Sartre, when they were still friends, sometimes ended at 4am. After Camus published the “Revolted man” (mistranslated in English as “The Rebel”; “rebel” in French is “rebelle”), Camus discovered that his critique of fascism a la Stalin and (death) camps, Soviet style, exposed him to loathing from friends… who had never been truly friends, he observed, dejectedly.

Now, of course, friends are not necessary, to us philosophers: we have the Internet, where critter annihilation is one click away.

More than ever, physics is rich in metaphor, and even methods, which enrich our global wisdom: we have progressed a lot in knowing the world for certain, since Montaigne

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Want Plutocratization? Start with Stupidification!

Foucault wanted to explore unusual mental states. So he tried (thus he pretends) drugs and “eroticism”. However, Nietzsche did it better: he climbed mountains, solo. The latter activity, full entanglement with nature, with bare hands, and bare mind, reveals what the human mind is fully capable of. Sex and drugs are just crutches for minds handicapped by the perspective of nature itself, and how to endure it.

Tellingly, even the pathetic Foucault was much more entangled with life than the pretend phantoms of “linguistic” and Anglo-Saxon pseudosophy.

Camille Paglia had total contempt for Foucault: he was a liar, she screamed (correctly). Foucault was in more way than one, a noble predecessor of the likes of Tariq Ramadan. Part and parcel of the general stupidification program. Not to say he said was stupid. Far from it.

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Oxford Preaches Abuse of Women:

Tariq Ramadan had prestigious teaching positions in more than half a dozen universities. He is adviser to the British government. He has been all over French TV for decades. He had two “don” position at Oxford (one in “Oriental Studies” the other in Islam).

Ramadan has been accused of violence against women, for many years. Never mind: he was proclaimed, again and again one of the planet’s top thinkers. Apparently, it requires top thinking to justify the stoning of women (as Ramadan does). As the weasel Ramada is, he long presented abuse and violences against women as a sort of provisional state..

Mr Ramadan, a well-known figure who has been affiliated with Oxford university since 2005, was seen “walking and laughing in the halls as if nothing had happened”, the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell reported. Even though more than 2,000 had signed a petition to have the propagandist of abuse removed, after it surfaced many women accused him explicitly of violence (some of these women are Jihadists). The rape evidence have long been in police labs, but Ramadan is sacred, after all, he is an islamist, so no judicial examination was started, even in France, especially in France.

The term “Don” derives from the latin “Dominus” (Lord, used in the late empire starting around 300 CE to qualify the emperor). Because priests got called that way, what became universities in England used to be ecclesiastical.

For decades, Ramadan has gone around the world, being asked point blank, yet never condemning the stoning of women for behaviors which were already not criminal in the Roman Republic 2,100 years ago. Instead Ramadan has always called stoning “unimplementable”.

The only thing which can be implemented is Islam fanatics preaching in the top universities, to make us all stupid. When Darwin and Lyell were young, they had to go to Edinburgh to learn evolution theory (Lamarck’s theory). Evolution was not taught in England, because it contradicted the cult of God/Allah. In a similar vein, Ramadan was an adviser to the British government (one of several he so advise). How to rape women and get away with it?

Many facile viewpoints are in the silly, silly category. All what is, is not what meets the eye, or the ear.

1) Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty was monstrous: it proposed to override democracies. The excuse for it was that it was an alliance AGAINST China. Trump destroyed that anti-democratic plot. Even Clinton had turned against it. (And of course Sanders!)

2) Trump didn’t pull the US out of the Paris Climate Treaty: he just said he did. In truth it can’t happen before 2020. Meanwhile, last Saturday, the US government produced the most alarming climate warming alert ever, saying 2.1 Celsius rise was guaranteed by 2100. And the rise could be as much as 4.7 Celsius (= apocalypse: poles melting, 70 meter sea rise, world hypoxia). Obama posed as an enemy of coal and pipelines: he did both, massively, stealthily. Trump poses as the opposite. Pay attention to what he does. By letting his scientists predict that the climate situation is going actually to become hyper catastrophic, Trump is working deep on the climate skeptics…

3) Obama named as ambassadors his hyper wealthy friends. Trump fired them on day one, while Obama was still in the air carried by Air Force One (relabelled!) to visit in Palm Springs the billionaire he had named ambassador to Spain.

Machiavellism consists in doing what one is doing in such a way others feel it is the opposite. Trump surrounded himself with experienced generals. Obama surrounded himself with experienced gold diggers… While doing to the letter the exact program concocted by Goldman Sachs under Bush. When Obama left the presidency, inequality had never been higher in the history of the USA.

Meanwhile the monopoly system set-up under Clinton-Bush-Obama starts to get noticed. Obama did, in the average, one “fund raiser” (= conspiring with the world’s wealthiest people, in exchange for money) per WEEK, during his 8 years of presidency. That’s around 420 fundraisers. One of the pillars of that corruption was Alwalid Bin Talal Al Saud, grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia, now under arrest, and the controller of Citigroup… It’s entirely possible that the can of wiggling worms is finally going to be open…

Obama was the best friend of global plutocratic monopolies. This era could come to an end, as enemies of Trump such as Al Talal are exposed. It could indeed happen that the arrangements behind the scenes to help those plutocrats made by Obama and his minders, come to the light. Is this what the Trump Derangement Syndrome organizers are afraid of?

Michael Jackson used to babysit Trump’s children (!): as this is increasingly known, the accusations of racism against Trump have become less prominent. Other facile accusations should also be discontinued.

Patrice Ayme added: The US economy, with 3% GDP growth (second quarter in a row) is not “overheating”. What Berlin wants is supremacy. A prolongation of the present German economic & political supremacy. Germans should be reminded that’s uncomfortably close to a dreadful past, persistently engaged, ever since Prussia thought that, thanks to British financing, it could afford racism and exploitation of Jews, Poles and others. That mentality lasted from mid Eighteenth Century until May 8, 1945. What we observe now is a full resurgence thereof. Let’s cut the crap.

Abuse is abuse, a form of sustainable violence. Sustainable violence can only be broken by wisdom triumphant, or greater violence, irresistible. In any case abuse is the seed for a storm, mental, or otherwise.

November 11: Time to remember again what the Germans did in 1914, and 1939. The time for excuses is over. The time for explanations is needed. To avoid the time of another replication.

Far From Being Absurd, Life May Be A Quantum Force That Gets Ever More Complex

The most striking feature of the Quantum is that, by doing something somewhere, one can change the state of something else, somewhere else. Einstein found this “spooky”. Philosophically, it just says that, whatever the universe is about, it’s not about old fashion “points”, as found in old fashion mathematics.

This “Quantum Entanglement” and the related, yet diluted “Quantum Discord” constitute the true architecture of the universe. This revelation ought to impact everything. Not just philosophy, but also psychology.

I propose the following. Life, its gathering complexity, adaptability, progress, ethology, meaning, are all animated by the very nature of the Quantum. It’s neither weird, nor absurd, it’s a force that proceeds.

Let me backtrack a bit.

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.”

What does this mean? Not much. Besides the admission that apparently much of Camus’ life was absurd. Camus should have done like Nietzsche, and go climb mountains solo. There, as Nietzsche did, he would have found meaning.

One does not decide if life is worth living, most of the time, because, most of the time, life is not a choice. One does chose to breathe. One breathes. When one is thirsty, one drinks, and so on. There is a mechanical aspect to animals, who are machines which live. Most of the time, an animal’s systems are on automatic, best described by inertia.

Animals find meaning by experiencing the life that they are made for.

Recent studies have shown that young lions get neurological damage, if they don’t chew hard on tough flesh. Being a lion is meant to be tough, to be fulfilling. Camus and company lived too soft, in their hour of glory.

Lamarck believed that two forces acted on evolution. One had to do with adapting to the environment, the other was the “Pouvoir de Vie”. This “Life Power” brought increasing complexity to biological evolution. It goes without saying that it is observed. It is an open question whether life started on Mars (it probably did). What is clear, though, is that fortunes are spent to sterilize landers sent to other planets (including the Moon), because exobiologists are worried that today’s Earth life would take over: Earth life has become so complex, it can adapt to what space can throw at it.

This “Life Power” made reductionists spiteful, because they saw no science based reason for it. However, if they had been smarter, they would have seen it that it was a fact. They knew too much Classical and Thermo Dynamics… While the true nature of Quantum Physics was hidden by the siren song of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Quantum Physics depends upon law (unfortunately, that “law” varies; it can be an infuriatingly parachuted wave equation, or another, or, more generally in the “Standard Model”, some manipulation of a hyper complicated Laplacian; in any case, it has to do with waves… Non-linear waves, in the general case!), initial conditions, and also the final space (a Hilbert space generated by eigenstates). This makes Quantum Mechanics somewhat teleological, an inconceivable horror for the classic-mechanical minded.

It means the Quantum looks far ahead, and everywhere, as if it were a god in the machine. It is a god, the god, in the machine…

The final space for genes is the environment. Genes are Quantum machines (a bit like Turing machines, but operated by the Quantum). This interaction between the genetic machinery and the environment means that we have a Quantum mechanism for fast adaptation to the environment.

Someday, soon, Quantum Biology may well become the queen of sciences… Ruling even mathamatics.

But not only this. The Quantum force operates through Quantum Entanglement… Entanglement creates a complexity at a distance, and that complexity propagates, as the Quantum Entanglement does.

So it is as if life progressed by extending Quantum tendrils in all spaces that it can reach, and it can reach a lot. There is Lamarck’ Life Power, there is the increasing complexity, and there is progress. If biology itself progresses, at fortiori culture, the minds’ tendrils.

Why was Camus so obsessed by absurdity? Because he got surrounded by absurdity. He came from a dirt poor environment in Algeria, and, in exchange for valor and work, was given everything by the Republic. This testimony, a celebration of human rights and equal opportunity, was then confronted to “intellectuals” who inverted, and buried all these values… In their names. Camus was told to follow Comrade Stalin, instead. When he begged to differ, he is called a colonial racist.

What is teleology? It’s the logic of the ends, the logic of purposes, logic at a distance. Socrates believed in it. Plato and Aristotle had their own versions. During the Enlightenment, dominated , and inspired as it was by Classical Mechanics, teleology got assimilated to the discredited Christian god, and fell into contempt.

We know more now, and we can afford different, more sophisticated teleologies. I claim that life is teleological, because it evolves not just haphazardly (“stochastically”), but also teleologically (thanks to Quantum Physics, which provides eyes and a feeling… for what is going on at a distance).

Teleology at the level of hydrogen bonds? Most probably (surprise, surprise). Modify the DNA’s environment, and Quantum Computational pressure is exerted on DNA’s hydrogen bonds (among other bonds). Thus the DNA will evolve much faster than (classical “Darwinian”) haphazard mutations would have it. It is such an obvious mechanism that evolution is bound to have selected for it. Life’s little secret is the Quantum!

Experiments are planned. All this will be probably viewed as obvious, all along, within ten years.

What this teleology does is to make life ever more adapted and ever more adaptable. If one measures progress by adaptability, progress there has been, as adaptability has progressed.

Philosophically, it means that, in the deepest sense, life, thanks to the Quantum, is behaving as if it were making value judgments. For example, at the molecular level, lowest energy solutions can be evaluated, and selected.

What is the aim of that teleology? Survival of the life form adapting. A question which immediately surges, is what is life? One thing that is clear, though, is the definition of goodness. For a give lifeform, that means survival of said lifeform. So, naturally enough, goodness will vary according to species, but also tribes, and even individuals.

So let the biggest goodness, and the goodness of the strongest lifeform win (as Nietzsche insisted… and this is the way life always has had it… as Nietzsche himself pointed out, following Sade, who was even clearer!)

Experiments in ethology are starting to test this (EJ Winner ought to consider them! ;-)). Basic psychology, such as a sense of fairness, have obvious survival values in social species such as primates.

Intelligence is also teleological. Philosophically, one can argue that intelligence, and even culture, are an extension of the adaptability of life at the nanometer scale, harnessing the Quantum. The extension probably uses the same Quantum machinery that starts to be put in evidence at the molecular level (say in the chlorophyll molecule).

If Homo Is Aware, Is the Universe Aware? It’s a bit like the question of pondering whether a planet harboring life is alive, or not. Earth is certainly alive, because life enables the very conditions on Earth that enable of its on-going existence, so far. The advent of oxygen producing lifeforms enabled the progress of complexity, hence the apparition of intelligence and advanced ethology of the conscious type.

Speaking of this, a question naturally arises: what is the definition of life? Life, so far, has no definition. The greatest minds have been left speechless.

Considering the preceding, clearly, such a definition will have to involve the Quantum, and Entanglement, besides reproduction. Crystals, and Quasi-crystals can reproduce an Entanglement architecture, but they are intensely boring. They can be described by just one equation.

Life is any Quantum Entanglement architecture which can approximately self-reproduce and adapt while being described by a potentially growing set of equations.

Probably, we are aspects of the Entanglements and Delocalization that the Quantum is capable of, at least in a little corner of the universe. We don’t need no Sisyphus: we can operate on it, at a distance.

Spooky, admittedly, but that’s what we are.

All these revelations change the overall mood towards the purpose of life. Life is not absurd, it simply is a growing, entangled complexity, our morality and intelligence, hopes, meaning, and consciousness are entangled with it. But the solutions we cling to, all too long, can well be, indeed, all too disjointed, point-wise, disconnected, and thoroughly absurd.

Equally clearly, the (meta, or final!) solution is to have all the absurdities gobbled up by life itself.

I read on an Academic site in the USA that: “Albert Camus supported French colonialism”. That struck me as grotesquely incorrect. An horrendous statement. (And I am not particularly in love with Camus’ work.)

Unsurprisingly, my retort was not published. Amusingly the initial essay was called “Stifling Discourse On the Left”.

Why was I stifled? Because it’s obvious to all “bien-pensants” (well-thinkers) that the stifling French rule in Algeria was a terrible, colonial thing.

Once a citizen of the USA expressed that opinion, that the colonial French deserved what had happened to them in Algeria. He was a geologist, an old friend of my dad. You know, the way friends are made in the USA: fair weather, and not too deep, politically correct in all American ways.

My dad an Algerian born geologist who discovered Algerian oil and gas (while employed by an Algerian oil company). He found the verbal trashing of his homeland inspiring. He retorted: “Certainly, there would have been no civil war in Algeria, if the French had killed all the Natives, the way it was done in the USA”.

The American “friend” was not amused at all. He and his family ceased all and any contact with ours. So much for the great American friendship. His name was Birdstall.

Camus was brought up by his mother in Algeria, where he was born, under extremely modest circumstances. Poorest of the poor. Saved by the Republican educational system (when it still worked). To call Camus’ family background “colonial” is an insult.

The excuse to trash Camus is always the same. After he got the Nobel in literature, a student called on him to take a stance about the civil war in Algeria. Camus retorted, off the cuff, that: ”Si j’ai a choisir entre ma mere et la justice, je choisirai ma mere” (or words to this effect). “If I have to choose between my mother, and justice, I will chose my mother.”

Well, “justice” is a social construct. One may well find oneself in conflict with it. Just ask dozens of millions of Mitteleuropa citizens, in the 1930s and 1940s. Or any country, just before a revolution. Algeria was in a revolution in the 1950s, justice was taking a back seat to motherhood.

It has become common opinion that the good guys were from the Front National de Liberation. The opinion was all the more common as it advantaged the USSR… and the USA.

However, most people living in Algeria did not support the FNL. How do I know this? Among other things, there was a vote! In the early 1960s, more than 60% of the Algerian population voted for the new French Constitution.

That was the first, and last free vote Algerians would get.

As The Economist put it in 2001: ”… given that the French army by the end of the 1950s had more or less won its war in Algeria, why did Algeria nonetheless gain its independence? If Mr Stora is puzzled, Mr Wall is not… French public opinion was sickened; the French intelligentsia was outraged by the practice of torture; and, “just as important”, America could not accept French policy.

Did Charles de Gaulle, summoned back in 1958 to meet France’s constitutional crisis and end the Algerian war, realise all this? Conventional wisdom is that he was France’s far-sighted saviour, accepting almost from the outset that the loss of Algeria was inevitable. Mr Wall, having trailed through both French and American archives, disagrees. De Gaulle’s acceptance of Algerian independence was a belated pragmatism, forced on him by his failure to win over the Americans, first under Eisenhower and then under Kennedy.

…pessimistic implications for the future… the United States was a critical force in pressing France to accept Algerian independence.”

That’s also my opinion. To make matters worse, the average French population was anti-Algerian racist (both against Muslim and Pieds Noirs)… And so was De Gaulle (who made very clear racist statements).

That was not just criminal, but thoroughly idiotic.

Why? Because it made a travesty of reality under the guise of political correctness, when all it was reflected a subjugation to the USA’s White House, and its attached plutocratic Congress.

What was the idiocy?

Most people in Algeria who did not support the FNL. (Nor did they support the French colons, who were a small, distinct class… And they did not support those colons for the same reasons that they did not support the FNL).

Sartre, and many “intellectuals” support of the extremely cruel FNL was an offense against civilization (later pursued with Sartre’s support of hard core “Maoism”).

The FNL advocated publicly terror torture of toddlers. That some elements in the French army used torture on some terrorist suspects is a separate issue. The French army never advocated publicly to torture toddlers.

Do you want to live in a country where the leaders have advocated torturing toddlers? Few would. So, when De Gaulle, on orders from the USA, gave Algeria to the FNL, he was being treacherous and stupid: of course most Algerians wanted to move to France, as being overruled by blood thirsty tyrants had little appeal.

So De Gaulle did his best to prevent that mass exodus. Still, the pressure is still on, and 52 years later, it’s much easier for an Algerian to immigrate to the USA, than to France.

And guess what? The present president of Algeria, Bouteflika, a corpse in a wheelchair, is an ex-general from the original FNL.

So what of Camus? In truth Camus begged to differ with most of the French intelligentsia, which was more into being a well thinking herd, than really thinking, and this is why he got trashed. Still is.

Camus wanted the Algerian Civil War to stop. Camus wanted the Republic to be strong, and motherly. But the Republic is relatively weak, and getting weaker. Those who conquered entire continents (Anglo-Saxons, Russians) are stronger. Their reasons are thus better. If nothing else they sit on all that oil and gaz. Even if the ground explodes cataclysmically, nowadays, with all that warming:

It does not matter. The ground explodes? War is their friend. Let there be war. It’s just a matter of not being on the losing side. A chorus of well-paid intellectuals singing their praises, is most helpful. Yesterday the Bible, today those who recite their well honed version of history.

Dragging Camus in the mud by modifying his beliefs is deeply dishonest. So was the devastation of 1962, when many populations which lived in Algeria before Islam was invented, and Arabic written, 3,000 kilometers away, found themselves in a worse tyranny than they were under Paris’ boot. (Only the Jews could flee in majority; many ended in Israel.)

The future of Algeria? Just wait for the oil and gas to run out. Then the other shoe will drop.